Ethiopia’s army on Thursday said that the country has been forced into an “unexpected and aimless war” with its Tigray region, while Tigray alleged that fighter jets had bombed areas around its capital.
Lieutenant General Birhanu Jula, deputy chief of Ethiopia’s army, said that forces were being sent to the fighting in Tigray from other parts of the country.
“The army will not go anywhere,” Jula told reporters, amid fears that the conflict would spill into other regions of Africa’s second-most populous nation. “The war will end there.”
Photo: AP
For his part, Tigray People’s Liberation Front Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, who is acting president of the region, told reporters that “we are in position to defend ourselves from enemies that waged war on the Tigray region... We are ready to be martyrs.”
Ethiopia’s government has not commented on the bombing accusation, which was read on the Tigray regional broadcaster.
Gebremichael’s words came a day after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told the nation that the military would carry out further operations this week in response to an alleged deadly attack on a military base by the regional government.
Observers warn that a civil war in Ethiopia involving Tigray could destabilize the already turbulent Horn of Africa.
Ahmed, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his sweeping political reforms, faces his greatest challenge in holding together a country of about 110 million people with multiple ethnic and other grievances.
Communications remained cut off in the northern Tigray region after services disappeared at about the time Abiy’s office on Wednesday announced the attack and military action.
The lack of contact has challenged efforts to verify the Ethiopian federal government’s account of events.
The Tigray capital, Mekele, appeared calm on Thursday, but skirmishes took place elsewhere, a source told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media about it.
Jula said that members of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front are “fleeing and joining the army; those injured are receiving medical treatment.”
The army was trying to avoid civilian casualties, he said.
Gebremichael said that the Ethiopian army’s northern command is siding with the Tigray people and confirmed that fighting is also taking place in an area bordering the Amhara region, far from where the original clash was reported.
“They are surrounding us with their forces,” he said.
Verifying either side’s claims remained a challenge.
“Certainly there is fighting, but I don’t think anyone can credibly assert who attacked who first,” former US diplomat Payton Knopf, a senior adviser with the US Institute of Peace, told reporters on Wednesday.
He asked why the well-armed Tigray region’s forces would start by raiding a command post.
“They’re not lacking for weaponry,” he said.
Aid organizations and human rights groups are pleading for communications links to be restored and warning of a humanitarian disaster if hundreds of thousands of people flee fighting in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ethiopia has imposed a six-month state of emergency on Tigray, which played a dominant role in the country’s government and military before Abiy took office in 2018.
Since then the region has split from the ruling coalition and defied Abiy by holding a regional election in September that the federal government called illegal.
Tigray borders Eritrea, which fought a bloody border war with Ethiopia before the countries made peace in 2018, shortly after Abiy took power.
The Tigray regional government has accused Eritrea of teaming up with Ethiopia’s federal government in this week’s offensive.
Tigray officials have said that airspace over the region is closed and accused the federal government of deploying troops to “cow the people of Tigray into submission by force.”
It invited other members of the security forces across Ethiopia to join it in “opposing the colonel Abiy’s regime.”
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